Testimony - ISBNLookup.com

Publishers Weekly

The large cast does justice to Shreve’s engrossing novel. For once, the high school students—including Brian Kennedy as Silas, Eve Bianco as Noelle, Joshua Swanson as Rob, and Jill Apple as Sienna—sound genuinely young. Ellen Archer teases out all the meaning and emotion she can from the relatively small part of Anna, Silas’s mother. Robert Petkoff is less persuasive as Mike, the headmaster of the school, Anna’s eventual lover, and a pivotal figure in the dramatic events that unfold at Avery Academy. He sounds dispassionate and factual, but Shreve makes it clear that Mike is egotistical and rash. Photos and credits of all the cast members on the last disk are a welcome bonus as most of the performers deserve attention after their riveting narratives and fine ensemble work. A Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 11). (Oct.)

Library Journal

Shreve, author of the 1999 Oprah's Book Club® selection The Pilot's Wife and Resistance, which was adapted into a 2003 movie of the same name, begins her latest novel with a sex scandal at an elite New England boarding school. While a few of the characters are flat, listeners will enjoy the performances of the 14 talented readers, among them Ellen Archer, Kevin T. Collins, and Stephanie Wolfe. A fine example of how audio can transcend print; for public libraries. [Audio clip available through library.booksontape.com; the Little, Brown hc received a starred review, LJ8/08.-Ed.]
—Carly Wiggins

Kirkus Reviews

A sex scandal at a Massachusetts prep school seen through the eyes of students, teachers, parents and anyone else of even peripheral relevance. Shreve (Body Surfing, 2007, etc.) offers snapshot sketches within a framing device involving a researcher's interviews. Although the scandal-three of the school's basketball stars caught on tape being sexually serviced by a freshman girl-is almost tame by current real-life scandal standards, it is understandably life-shaking to those involved. Headmaster Mike Bordwin's attempts to contain the situation backfire when the girl's outraged parents call the police. His hard-won career disintegrates, as does his already shaky marriage. Those losses are nothing compared to his private sense of guilt; Bordwin knows Silas, a gifted scholarship student, was part of the filmed party only because he was very drunk, and he was drunk because he'd caught his mother in bed with Bordwin that morning. A sensitive moral innocent, Silas is horrified at his own behavior. Unable to face his girlfriend, he spends a cold New England night outside writing an apology and freezes to death. Naturally his mother, a devout Catholic, blames herself and her adulterous affair for the loss of her beloved only child. The other boys' mothers have their own guilt. Ellen sent Rob to boarding school to protect him from the very temptations to which he succumbed. Expelled, Rob now loses his early admission to Brown. Michelle, who has long sensed dark tendencies in James, now wishes she had been a stronger parent. James, who calls himself J.Dot, is a shallow unrepentant party animal. He blames the girl. As does Shreve, who paints "Sienna" as a 14-year-old vixen with no qualms aboutpretending she's the victim, although she purposefully set out to seduce the boys, particularly J.Dot. Afterward she moves on to a new school and, one suspects, new victims. Thoughtful Rob is the only one with a genuinely positive outlook on his future. Slick but lacking depth. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh/William Morris Agency

Bette-Lee Fox

A tale that is mesmerizing, hypnotic, and compulsive. No one walks away unscathed, and that includes the reader.
— Library Journal

Sherryl Connelly

Gripping....Shreve sets us down in a swirling drama that ruins lives, ends one, all stemming from a night of drunken abandon at a prep school.
— New York Daily News

Jennifer Roolf Laster

Gripping. . . . TESTIMONY will break your heart even as you race on to the next page.
— Houston Chronicle

Carmela Ciuraru

Haunting....Paced like a thriller, TESTIMONY sustains its intensity to the end.
— Hallmark